Eyeing Morganville’s walls, Dan mentally added “learn a gravity spell” to his to-do list. The walls themselves were made of a single sheet of greyish white stone that seemed to grow up from the very ground itself. Without any cracks to wedge a hand or foot into, there was about zero chance of him climbing over the wall without magic or a rope. Luckily, they were designed to keep monsters and bandits out, not disaffected villagers in. Watchtowers liberally spotted the walls, and each one had a door at ground level and presumably a spiral staircase or ladder inside. He could still jump the wall, but doing so meant sprinting through a guard post.
Listening to the clamor behind him, Dan smiled wryly. Nora, Andrea, and their “friends” were definitely still pursuing him. There really wasn’t any chance of him making it through the gate, and if he waited long enough, they’d find him even here. He’d picked a fairly remote section of the walls in a poorer section of town, but he had a strong suspicion that Nora’s employers were already arranging a search of the entire village.
“No sense waiting, then,” he mumbled to himself before sprinting toward the nearest watchtower. As a pleasant side effect of being in a poor section of town, whatever ordinances or social norms usually prevented people from building their residences up against Morganville’s walls went unenforced. In short, he only had to cross about thirty feet between the shack he was hiding behind to reach the front door of the tower. One kick later, the unbarred door slammed inward, revealing a small waiting area where three surprised guards were playing some sort of card game.
Dan didn’t give them a chance to react, instead throwing a handful of metal filings and activating Spark Field. One of these days, he would get around to upgrading the spell to make it more than a distraction, but with the surprised guards, it served its purpose. The air around the coffee table they were playing on shimmered with electrical charge as Dan tore past them and took the steps of the tower’s staircase two at a time. Below him, the guards screamed and swore as they tried to escape from the distracting and annoying shocks from the spell.
Almost fifteen seconds later, Dan reached the wall level of the tower. The staircase continued up, but this room was a small armory with archways opening up to the battlements going in either direction. Already, the guards thundered toward the steps below him. He quickly glanced around the guard post before grabbing a length of rope from where it hung next to a hammer and some other tools. Figuring that he had pushed his luck with the pursuing guards about as far as it was likely to go, Dan ran out onto the wall and immediately wrapped the length of rope around a battlement.
A poorly-aimed arrow clattered off of the stone next to him, forcing Dan to look up. On top of the tower were two guards with shortbows. Gritting his teeth, he activated Spatial Shield and kept it on. Even with his greatly-enhanced mana supply, it greedily drained his reserves, but he had no desire to test the effectiveness of his chainmail against those bows. Almost immediately, his conservative impulses were confirmed as an arrow sailed into the barrier and curved. It still hit him in the side and cut skin through the chain, but it would have been a critical blow without the help of the spell.
Spurred on by the arrows, he finished the simple knot, hoping that the Thoth Foundation’s brief refresher of his years in the boy scouts would be enough for the knot to hold. Grabbing onto the rope, he threw himself over the edge just as the first guards from the ground floor reached the top of the wall. Kicking off the wall with his back to the ground, Dan tried to lower himself as quickly as possible. Another arrow sailed past him, a victim of the bad angles formed by him hugging the wall, as well as the spatial shield spell. Above, yelling echoed off the walls, and the rope vibrated in his hands as someone tried to cut it with a knife. Just before he reached the ground, the rope gave way, and Dan fell the final three to four feet and landed on his back.
Ignoring the pain in his side from the arrow and the dull ache in his back, Dan hauled himself to his feet and ran. Behind him, a horn sounded, and he redoubled his speed as arrows fell around him. About three hundred feet from the wall, he cut the mana to Spatial Shield. Already, his head ached from the strain of maintaining the spell. He hoped that the range was too much for the archers to precisely target him, but he wasn’t going to stop and turn around to judge the accuracy of his prediction.
Dan slowed his sprint to a more maintainable jog. He didn’t know if Nora and her employers would be coming after him, but there was no question she knew her way around Twilight’s wastes much better than him. Instead, his only real option was to look for another location where her organization wouldn’t have much interest, be that another town or simply holing up in a mountain like a hermit or a bandit. Unfortunately, he didn’t even know where a nearby town would be.
Nora had handled all navigation. He swore under his breath. Yet another way she kept him dependent on her.
He thought back on the previous couple of days and cursed to himself. He could blame Nora’s magic, but the truth was that he had fallen back into bad habits. From childhood on, his father had been a distant but friendly character, but his mother controlled his life. She picked his highschool, she picked his extracurriculars, she vetoed his friends that were “bad characters.”
Any time he tried to oppose her, it lead to hours of screaming and guilt trips. How much she had sacrificed to give him everything he had, how she just wanted the best for him. Before long, it became easier for him to give in, rather than fight. He knew that his relationship with her was toxic and codependent, but it wasn’t like he could simply cut his mother out of his life.
Well, he had tried. In college, he dated Annabelle, and his mother hated her. She was beautiful, she was witty, and she wasted no time explaining to Dan how his mother was stunting him. After a screaming match over Christmas dinner, his mother had given him an ultimatum. Break up with Annabelle, or find his own way to pay for college. With Annabelle’s help, he had filed for grants and applied for loans. Even with everything that happened later, one of the happiest moments of his life was when he had been able to tell his mother what she could do with her financial aid.
Unfortunately, he just traded one set of handcuffs for another. As soon as he stopped talking with his mother, Annabelle more or less took over her role. He was told which of his friends were unacceptable, and which of his classes he needed to drop. More and more, he stopped hanging out with his group of friends and ended up spending time with Annabelle’s clique. Then, after almost two years of dating, he found her in bed with his former best friend.
It had torn him apart, but the worst thing was that she didn’t even try to fight him. She just laughed at the lost look on his face and told him, “Your lack of confidence and indecision are exactly why this has been going on for the past six months.” At that point, Dan had turned to his mother for emotional support. All it took was admitting through gritted teeth that she had always been right about the trollop, and he was back in her good graces… So long as he was a dutiful son and did everything she asked.
At some point, he had realized that his life was completely out of control. He was a follower, bouncing from one strong personality to another and going with the flow. He had gone to grad school and signed on as a contractor with the army far away from home to try and make something of himself, gain some independence. It worked after a fashion, but here he was again.
It would be so easy for him to blame outside forces. Nora used magic on him. He didn’t understand the new world, so he used her as a guide. He needed help to fight monsters and gain magic. All of them had a grain of truth, but deep down Dan knew the real problem was him. Emotionally, he was a wounded animal, and he drew in predators. Nora, Annabelle, and his mom were all the same person. Going to another town wouldn’t change the outcome until he could learn to actually stick up for himself.
Almost two miles from Morganville, he stopped running, heaving for breath. If he was going to find confidence, he might as well do it fighting magic-fueled monsters in the middle of nowhere.
Honestly, it wasn’t the worst idea ever. The nanites would protect him from poisons and disease. He could eat the monsters he killed, counting on the System to help him digest the alien meat. So long as the sanctuary runes held out, and he didn’t mind living a little rough, Dan could live outdoors indefinitely.
More importantly, constant encounters with monsters would serve as a perfect whetstone for him. Dan could simply spend a month or so fighting monsters and honing his skills, far away from the confusion and social pitfalls of civilization.
The formula was simple. If he killed enough monsters, he’d earn the mana he needed to gain a rank. If he practiced magic enough, he’d learn a new spell. The creatures he encountered would all want to kill and eat him, and if he wanted to survive, he’d simply have to beat them to the punch.
As easy as it would be to sulk away with his tail between his legs, Dan refused to treat his exile from civilization as anything more than a temporary setback. So long as he could remain undiscovered, the monster and mana-rich mountains far outside of Morganville were more opportunity than punishment. More than anything, they were a prime chance for him to gain the confidence he’d need to avoid being someone’s doormat ever again.
